Automated title search vendors: is the examiner the product or the bottleneck?

I came into this from a completely different industry and one of the first things I noticed is how much of a title search is pattern matching against recorded documents. Which is exactly what software is decent at now. Several vendors will pull the chain, OCR the instruments, flag likely liens, and hand a human a draft commitment. Some shops report cutting examination time meaningfully on clean residential files.

So the argument I've been chewing on. On a standard suburban single family with two prior sales and one mortgage, the machine draft is probably close to right, and the examiner's remaining job is a review pass. If that's true, the economics of a title shop shift toward volume and away from headcount, and the shops that don't automate get undercut on price.

The other side is that the value was never in finding the documents. It's in reading the weird one. A deed with a scrivener's error, a probate that closed in a different county, a mechanic's lien that references the wrong parcel number. Those cases are where the underwriter's money is at risk, and a review pass over a machine draft is a different mental posture than examining from scratch. You catch less when you're checking someone else's work.

There's also a plain question of what share of files are actually the clean case. If it's 80 percent, automation wins on the P&L. If it's 55 percent, the exception handling swamps the savings.

I don't have a shop, so I have no stake. What do the people running files think?